Meet the woman who should be our next morning TV star

Antoinette Braybrook is both smart and beautiful. This is actually the worst way to describe someone, but bear with me for a minute.

Braybrook has never, ever been on morning television. Which is strange. On the rare occasions I’ve done the breakfast thing, the folks in hair and make-up have had their work cut out for them. But enough about me. Antoinette Braybrook is one person who should be on television all the time - because she fulfils all the things television needs - but more importantly, because she actually knows what’s going on with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children. It is her whole life’s work.

Ninety-three per cent of Family Violence Prevention Legal Service caseloads are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children.Credit:John Donegan

Braybrook, born in Victoria on Wurundjeri country, is convenor of the National Family Violence and Prevention Legal Services (NFVPLS) Forum, which comprises 14 organisations nationally. They work exclusively with survivors of family violence and sexual assault, and the vast majority (93 per cent) of their caseload is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children.

We should all fear a new federal-government-funded review of FVPLSs to be handed down later this year, which may impact both frontline services and any national advocacy the groups undertake by insisting that if they want to continue receiving funding they will need to stop advocating. It’s the same approach that the federal government, under former attorney-general George Brandis, took to the Environmental Defenders Office, which was to silence it through starving it of funding. That approach was wrong and is still wrong. Governments need to fund a diversity of voices. If we had that diversity of advocacy, we may not have had the current Murray-Darling catastrophe. You always need to listen to your critics; that's a lesson all politicians should learn.

“Community legal services see what’s happening at the coal face – they are best placed to see where the law goes wrong, where it doesn’t assist the community at all and where changes need to be made to help the community as a whole,” says Stephanie Booker, chief executive and principal solicitor of the Environmental Defenders Office ACT.

I doubt this government will ever come out in support of that – but here is one act which doesn’t require any bravery. First, all FVPLSs are on two-year contracts. That means they can’t plan for the future. We all know that family violence is ongoing and endemic, but the short contract times mean there can be no real planning. It also means that recruiting in remote and regional areas of Australia becomes even harder. Who is going to upheave their lives, only to have to move again after two years? It’s one of the reasons FVPLSs don’t always spend the money they get – it is not always possible to fill the staffing gaps.

The government could at least give FVPLSs CPI increases. It doesn’t – which means that they are behind by around $9 million. Of all the FVPLSs, 13 out of 14 have had no increase in core funding since 2014. That seems to me to be directly punitive to Indigenous communities, which, by the way, do not receive any specific funding for Indigenous family violence services in urban areas even though one-third of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population lives in capital cities. If you don’t remember anything else about what happens to Aboriginal women and children, remember this: there are entire communities - urban, rural and remote -which don’t have any culturally safe specialist services. That is completely unacceptable.

We know, based on the experience of the Environmental Defenders Office, that advocacy has always been a problem for this government. But Jackie Huggins, the co-chairwoman of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, says that without advocacy “we don’t have a voice and that voice needs to emanate from within the Aboriginal community.”

“I know from experience that organisations which don’t have the appropriate staffing and resources are doomed to fail in so many respects,” she says.

As UNSW's dean of law George Williams wrote in 2017, the Productivity Commission recommended in 2014 that government invest a further $200 million a year into the legal assistance sector. This funding actually saves money in the long run. The ALP made promises to address the funding shortfalls in the 2016 election campaign, so we can only hope that it keeps those old promises.

The current investment in FVPLSs is $121.2 million over the five years through to June 2020. Yet last year, the Law Council of Australia found that a range of organisations, including the FVPLSes, required major increases to address gaps.